At an event called “Show and Tell”, Elon Musk announced that his neurotechnology startup, Neuralink, aims to implant one of its devices into the brain of a human being in six months.
During the event, Musk stated that the company had submitted much of the paperwork required for human clinical trials to the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA), which regulates the US medical device market.
Musk assured that the company will proceed with caution. He promised that when implanting the chip in animals in prior trials, all relevant precautions had been taken.
Neuralink’s goal is to develop a device that can be implanted in the brain and used to control a computer or phone via brain activity. Neuralink tested its chips on monkeys in 2019, pigs in 2020, and last year presented a video of a monkey playing a simple game of Pong with the help of an implanted chip.
The Neuralink device is implanted using a robot surgeon invented by the company, which manages to make all of the connections securely in approximately 20 minutes, according to Musk. Inside, an artificial intelligence-trained decoder will translate cerebral activity into a cursor movement or a keystroke.
